Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has died aged 65 after a battle with cancer, party officials have said.

Elias Mudzuri, a vice president of the Movement for Democratic Change party, reported Tsvangirai’s death in a post on Twitter on Wednesday.

“It is sad for me to announce that we have lost our icon and fighter for democracy,” Mudzuri wrote.

Tsvangirai has been in and out of hospitals suffering from colon cancer.

He served as prime minister under ex-President Robert Mugabe in a 2009-2013 unity government.

Obert Gutu, party spokesman, confirmed Tsvangirai’s death on Twitter, calling him “a political icon, a humble and tenacious fighter for the creation of a peaceful, stable, democratic and progressive nation state in Zimbabwe”.

Last week, Tsvangirai had taken to Twitter to play down speculation that his illness was terminal.

“I have cancer and [am] not feeling too well, but I am stable and the process is under control. … I am recovering,” he wrote on February 6.

Al Jazeera’s Haru Mutasa, reporting from Harare, said that people in Zimbabwe’s capital were “shocked” at the news of his death.

“A lot of people are saying they are going to miss him,” she said.

Who was Morgan Tsvanigarai?

A powerful public speaker, Tsvangirai was born in 1952 to a bricklayer father in Buhera, in the southeast of Zimbabwe.

At independence from Britain in 1980, Tsvangirai became branch chairman of the National Mine Workers Union, rising through the ranks to become secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in 1988, a post he relinquished when he formed the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999.

In the 2008 elections he was the main challenger to Mugabe and his ZANU-PF. He managed to win 47 percent of the vote, against Mugabe’s 43 percent, but fell short of the threshold needed to avoid a second round.

Tsvangirai then boycotted the runoff, citing intimidation and harassment of his supporters, handing Mugabe the victory.